LENTZ GUITAR®

Lentz Guitar® has a deep appreciation for the most iconic historical guitars. We bring more than 60 combined years of passion and guitar-making excellence to every guitar we make, from our Traditional and JR Reserve guitars, to our own designs.

With all Lentz guitars, painstakingly chosen materials and masterful construction bring out the richness and beauty of each instrument. We use aged and resonant woods, and all assembly is done with hide glue. Hide glue is more difficult to work with than standard wood glue, but it dries to a crystalline hardness that doesn’t dampen sound vibrations like yellow wood glue. Hardware is carefully chosen for the proper weight and composition, and pickups are hand wound in-house for each guitar. We have also perfected laminated neck construction for a stable and perfect neck that will rarely if ever need adjustment. By being attentive to every detail in the construction process, we have mastered the art of making world-class guitars.

We make several models, including the Traditional Series , the Legendary Venues Series (LVS), and Reserve guitars which mirror the aesthetics of historical guitars, but achieve unsurpassed tonal qualities. We have also designed four models that, while inspired by traditional instruments, are uniquely original designs. All four original models—SSL , HSL , DL-90 , and Croyden —share the same basic body shape, with refined and pure lines that make them timeless. All four models are extremely well balanced and incredibly comfortable to play. Yet, each has its own sonic footprint, its own tonal pallet.

We invite you to explore all our guitar models, and to think about your needs as a player. Then, give us a call or send an email and we can talk about how to make you a masterwork guitar that will inspire great music for years to come.

Lentz Guitar® – Original Design Series

For four decades, Lentz Guitar® has been uniformly committed to preserving—through construction and repair—the legacy of the most iconic guitars ever made. It’s not surprising that over the years, we have developed some of our own ideas about what makes a great instrument, and in 2005, we began to offer our vision of the electric guitar.

The Original Design Series started with the evolution of the Lentz Guitar® body shape. Over the years, we have gained a remarkably deep understanding of both the tonal properties of wood, and the ergonomics that make a guitar feel like an extension of the player. The shape that all of the Original Design Series guitars share was refined patiently over a number of years until we felt we had exactly what we envisioned: a wonderfully balanced and resonant guitar body that would be a fantastic platform for our pickups and hand-shaped necks.

The early Original Design Series guitars were conceived with our single coil pickups in mind, and very much inspired by our L-90 pickup. The L-90 has incredible articulation, and yet a fat, warm tone and higher output than standard single coils. It’s fair to say that when we got the L-90 right, the DL-90 guitar was not far behind. Later, we also developed our own humbucker pickup, and the Croyden was born. Each of the Original Design Series guitars has its own signature sound and personality, and they all have an extraordinarily wide tonal pallet.

Our goal with the Original Design Series was to bring our expansive experience with electric guitars to the creation of incredibly versatile instruments without limits. Our traditional style guitars bring our skill to the re-creation of particular guitars, whereas with the Original Design Series , we have been guided only by our passion, experience, and creativity. The Original Design Series is our vision of the perfect guitar.

Lentz Guitar® – Traditional Series

In the early 1950s, when the first T and S style guitars appeared on the market, they were thought of as a joke; guitar designs that would fade away quickly and be forgotten. Those early naysayers were wrong, to say the least, as any look through a current guitar magazine will reveal countless guitars from makers all around the globe that owe their DNA to the original T and S style guitars. In fact, there was genius in the designs—a sense of practicality, versatility, and a simplicity that allowed for easy maintenance and repair. Over the years, millions and millions of T and S style guitars have been made, and you find such guitars is every walk of music, from pure jazz to death metal.

Our Traditional Series guitars take those iconic designs to the next level. We have made a careful study of these guitars over many years, and have worked on literally hundreds of vintage T and S Style guitars. We’ve seen great guitars and not-so great guitars over the years and have been able to derive a set of principles that are common to the great ones. We bring this knowledge to our Traditional Series guitars, carefully selecting the raw wood and shaping the bodies and necks by hand. Every aspect of these models is carefully considered to bring out the true voice of each guitar. Articulate, warm round tones, great clarity and balance, and a wide tonal pallet; these qualities set our Traditional Series apart, fully embodying the promise of the original designs.